Gilded
by Bellicose Blue
Summary: Gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of charcoal.


**Dedicated to Crystals of Ice, in honor of us reaching our 1000th message in PM.**

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 _Live by the sword, die by the sword._

It's an ancient proverb, far older than Panem, from the stories of before, back when there was a God to believe in. Back before the people prayed for salvation and received only misery and death. It was used to warn against a life of violence, that only through peaceful cooperation could they be saved. But that wasn't the case. They waited peacefully, and then they fought, and still they were never freed.

The phrase is a hollow one now. It's barked to wiggly children as they're enrolled in the Training Center for their first year, standing as stiff and proud as they can beneath the heavy eyes of the people who will be their trainers and their competition. It's murmured with the weight of expectation to the boy and the girl who volunteer each year with the hopes of seizing victory, of lapping it from the stars. It's murmured above the graves of those same boys and girls when they return, as they usually do, in a box.

Enobaria doesn't plan to return as one of the fallen. She's something special, golden, _glorious_ , she knows that much. She's the best female trainee in her grade, skilled in every form of combat offered at the Center, and while she's breathtakingly vicious, it's tempered by a cold, cruel cunning. She won't go off in a blaze of glory and gore like so many of the past tributes from Two. No, she's been chosen to _win_.

And win she does. It begins in the Capitol, that glittering, serpentine city that fastens itself to her as she waves from a chariot, as she lets leak a playful hint of her deadliness during her interview. Gold complements her skin nicely and her stylists use it liberally, coating her skin, wrapping her body, tracing swirls that start as jagged lines on the edges of her eyes and fan out like flames that smolder across her face. Enobaria looks like a bronzed champion of old, the war-goddess Minerva who was famed for her wisdom as much as her violence.

Her Games are a story all their own, but they end so infamously with her perched above the body of the final tribute with his throat torn out. She licks her lips and savors the sweetness of his death as her victory is announced and she is taken from the arena. It's almost boring after that. The Capitolites love her, covet her attention, and eventually she gives in to her mentor's nudging and Snow's quiet insistence and gets the ends of her teeth filed into points. They're gold, too, and she smiles as frequently as she can that first year. She has no shortage of admirers in the Capitol.

Enobaria watches as massive, handsome Gloss takes the Games by storm the next year. He's followed the year after by his sister, a beautiful, lithe thing with a smile so sensual the Capitol swoons. Oh, but her beauty is her downfall, and Cashmere plays the willing guest of the Capitol, draped in jewels and shimmering fabrics and always on the arm of a new suitor. She's soft enough to play along. Snow tried that with Enobaria once, gave her an envelope and told her to obey, but she'd grinned with those filed fangs of hers and said she might not be _sweet_ enough, that she might forget her manners, and did he really want another person with their throat torn out? Her family, her parents and her little brother and her grandmother who was exhausted with age but still managed to smile when Enobaria came home, all died the next day, a gas leak, they told her. Enobaria didn't regret it.

Years go by, and though some of the rush about her died when Finnick became a Victor, Enobaria still commands attention when she returns to the Capitol to mentor. This was the part she'd been so excited about, to impart her knowledge to future Victors. But all of her tributes are failures, weak or weepy or obstinate, and they die one after another, bludgeoned in the Bloodbath or torn to pieces by their allies. She learns not to get attached.

Then there's Cato, brutal, sunbright, bloodthirsty Cato. He takes the proverb "by the sword" literally, choosing it as his token weapon while his District partner, the slight yet ferocious Clove, picks out a set of slim daggers. They're so very promising, glorious and ambitious and golden, yet they still fall so tantalizingly short of victory. Enobaria sniffs when Clove's arrogance turns against her, sneers as Cato's lack of cunning does him in. She hadn't trained them to _lose_.

Brutus shatters something in his room when the Games are finished and there are two Victors not their own. She can hear him spitting a long stream of expletives, and then something else breaks. There's silence for a few minutes, then he starts swearing again. Enobaria starts to laugh, the sound high and mocking. Had he really gotten attached to Cato? she wonders aloud, pitched loud enough that the words creep through the walls. It's malicious, the way she grins when he curses at her, and she doesn't stop laughing even when her door slams open and Brutus throws a punch at her. She dodges easily, countering with a jab to his windpipe, and then knocks him over. She purrs in his ear as she pins him down, _better get some control over yourself. I won't play nice next time_.

He tosses her aside like a rag doll and she remembers that though he's ten years older and slower, he's in just as good a shape for fighting as she is. But her words must reach whatever rational bit he has left, for he scowls, mutters a few choice words about her, and stalks out of the room. Enobaria props herself back up against the wall and laughs some more.

She knows the punishment of the next Games is passingly directed at her, for denying the Capitol their pleasure and still remaining one of the most powerful Victors. Brutus is thrilled to be back in the arena. Enobaria sees the scales tip away from the Capitol's favor and starts, quietly, to gather her resources. She won't go down silently, of that she's certain. She forms the typical Career alliances during training and gets swept up in the rebellious spirit of the other Victors during the interviews. Brutus' hand is calloused and far too warm, while Gloss's is cold and smooth. Enobaria lifts them both above her head and snarls a smile at the audience.

She fights as brutally as she can, figuring that if she's destined for death, she may as well take what pleasure she can. She and Brutus team up and together they hunt, sprinting through the methodically-deadly forest with the scent of blood curling into her nostrils. She's forgotten how _exhilarating_ it is to fight, to kill, and she loses herself in the frenzy.

When Enobaria wakes up to herself, she doesn't recognize her surroundings. Everything is white and clean and cold, so sterile she feels contaminated with her dark hair and gold teeth. She's always wanted to stand out, but now she tries to fade into the background, to sit placidly on the ground with her hair loose and her lips covering her teeth as President Snow himself walks in. There's been an uprising, he tells her, and now she's one of the few living Victors. Does she, he wonders, want to keep it that way?

She licks her lips and grins up at him, contorting her lips to reveal a flash of gold beneath her snarl. Doesn't he think she'd make for a bad role model? she asks him in return. So many people watching her interviews. What would happen if she… _slipped_?

She's been brazen all her life, but even she knows when she's gone too far. She can't be trusted on camera, she continues, but _he_ can. The girl's former lover, the boy stuck three cells over. She hears him screaming sometimes. Perhaps they could rework him, alter him like so many other Capitolites into someone willing to spout off the kind of propaganda the country wants to hear.

Snow eyes her contemplatively, coldly, and for a moment she thinks about poison and jutting ribs and nooses. It's the ultimate form of cowardice. She's been taught that all her life, but she contemplates it, mulls it over in her mind and decides that if she is to die, it'll be on her own terms. If two Hunger Games failed to kill her, she'll be damned if she dies in his torture chamber.

 _Go home_ , he tells her, and the words echo (go home go home go home) as her breath seizes, sputters in her throat. Enobaria is crowned in gold and glory, as radiant as the sun, and she thinks to herself how much _better_ this is than killing, than winning: hope makes her come alive.

Brutus is dead. That's what she learns when she arrives in Two, that her harsh, quick-tempered mentor died during the Games. That explains why she was so isolated in her cell block, then, but it doesn't explain the dull pain in her chest. Oh, she had never loved him. She wasn't even sure she was capable of love, all bundled fury and façades, too distant, too cruel for such a fragile emotion to ever survive. But Brutus had been her oldest friend and trusted guide. He had cared for her as strongly as he ever had for anyone, and together they had been a team.

Enobaria doesn't appreciate that he is gone.

She starts her rebellion in secret, double-meanings and half-meanings tumbling idly from her lips. She watches as a select few- one of the head workers in the mines, fellow Victor Lyme- twitch slightly at her words, uttered so casually to a crowd, and she catches their eye and grins.

They bring her into the fold carefully, tentatively, as if she's some sort of spy for the Capitol. Not, she thinks, an altogether paranoid assumption. Still, Enobaria bristles when Lyme- a woman she's regarded as, if not a friend, then a sympathetic figure- judges her trustworthiness aloud.

She bristles still more when, after Two had been captured by the rebels and Katniss Everdeen was shot live on camera and she'd been transported, abducted, really, to Thirteen, Johanna Mason demands an explanation for her presence. _I helped you,_ she thinks, _I helped all of you._ Then, aloud, she tells them, _let them have a taste of their own medicine_. She believes in a karmic form of justice, the eye for an eye and life for a life. Those Capitol brats, the ones who put on false teeth to look like her and begged for autographs when she would make her yearly visits, she'll accept their lives in trade for hers.

The war ends in chaos. Snow dies, and Enobaria can only think that his life should have been hers to take. The new government lets her return home to Two, to the emptiness of the Victors' Village that was just a year ago filled with allies, filled with friends. Enobaria sits on the steps of Brutus' house and buries her head in her hands, but no tears come. She hasn't been able to cry in years.

She is gilded with gold, draped in its icy, unreachable perfection. But beneath its thin veneer, she is brittle. She leaves the memories behind and moves to a lonely house on the mountainside, watches the dust fall around her, and thinks.

Everything – lust, power, glory – comes with a price. Some find their price too steep, too depraved. These are the people who live comfortable lives but never achieve greatness. Oh, but Enobaria wanted to be great. What use did she have for a soul, anyway? Now, hollow and tired, she understands just what she sacrificed when she first swore her life to bloodshed, when she slaughtered children and reveled in their suffering, in the salt of their blood. She understands this now, far too late. But it's worth it in the end, isn't it?

(she's still golden in the end, isn't she?)


End file.
